Redazione RHC : 12 October 2025 08:24
When Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, the company tried to stay away. The platform developed relatively independently until things began to change in recent months.
The departure of GitHub CEO Thomas Domke in August and the gradual merger with Microsoft’s internal structure have solidified this new direction. As The New Stack has learned, the next step in this integration will be a complete migration of GitHub’s infrastructure to the Azure cloud. To achieve this, the company even plans to delay the launch of new features.
In a letter to employees, CTO Vladimir Fedorov explained that GitHub’s Virginia headquarters is no longer able to handle the workload. The problem is a lack of resources, especially given the rapid growth in the use of artificial intelligence and Copilot .
He stated that the platform will have to completely abandon its data centers within 24 months. Of this timeframe, six months are reserved for unforeseen delays, meaning that most of the work will have to be completed within 18 months. The system will also operate simultaneously on both the old and new infrastructure for at least six months, reducing the actual timeframe to one year.
To meet the deadline, GitHub teams must now focus almost exclusively on the migration. Fedorov explicitly states that the priority is the migration to Azure, even if it means temporarily abandoning development of new features. He calls it a “window” during which product development can be temporarily slowed down for technical restructuring, and this window should be kept as short as possible.
GitHub has begun migrating to Azure previously, but so far the steps have been uneven and not always successful. There are also examples of successful migrations, such as the Proxima project, which allows European customers to store code exclusively in local Azure regions. It was developed without GitHub servers from the start and operates exclusively in the Microsoft cloud.
According to Fedorov, the platform simply needs to complete its migration, thanks in part to the rapidly gaining popularity of artificial intelligence tools . Azure is already used in components like GitHub Actions, search, edge nodes, and even Proxima . But now is the time to not only increase its share of the cloud, but to migrate to it entirely.
GitHub has recently experienced outages, one of which is due to limited resources at its main data center. Artificial intelligence agents, actively deployed in the new infrastructure, are creating additional workload. However, many employees are concerned about migrating critical services. This is especially true for MySQL clusters, which run on dedicated hardware. They are difficult to adapt to the cloud, and this could cause further outages.
In an official statement, GitHub confirmed its plans and explained that the infrastructure will need to support the growth of both the platform itself and its AI tools . The company believes the move to Azure is a necessary step for stable and scalable operations. This decision will enable faster releases and maintain reliability without being limited by current features.
Not all developers are enthusiastic about GitHub’s growing ties with Microsoft and Azure. This is especially true for open source advocates who valued the platform’s relative independence.
However, the main complaints now focus not on company structures, but on technical problems, such as outages and limitations, encountered by users.
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